5 December 2024

The women behind Humphrey Bogart

The documentary Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes searches for new insights into the actor’s life in his five closest female relationships.

By Jonathan Coe

Photo by Mptvimages / Eyevine

“Humphrey Bogart is ancient history,” I declared in the first sentence of the short book I once wrote about him. I was looking back on his cult following in the 1960s, when leftist students would have Bogie posters on their walls and Woody Allen wrote a play inspired by his mystique. But that book was written (good grief) 33 years ago. If Bogart was ancient history then, perhaps today he belongs to the cinema’s Jurassic period. A few years ago, when I made a forlorn effort to introduce my daughters to classic Hollywood (“Oh, Dad, not another of your grey films”), they warmed to James Stewart’s complexity and especially the laconic metrosexuality of Cary Grant, but Bogart seemed to leave them cold.

So maybe it’s not such a surprise to learn that Kathryn Ferguson’s Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is the first documentary feature about him to be released in cinemas. Her approach is interesting:a narrative structured around the five women most important to him. Lauren Bacall, obviously, but also his three other wives and his mother, Maud – a successful illustrator whose occupation, nevertheless, Bogart listed as “housewife” on her death certificate in 1940.

Bogart was born in New York in 1899 to Maud and her heart surgeon husband, Belmont. He served in the navy at the end of the First World War, and took up acting on his return, landing Broadway roles and then a Hollywood contract in 1929. Ferguson’s film is not a feminist reappraisal of Bogart, exactly, but it does shift the emphasis away from one of the things younger audiences might find off-putting: the atmosphere of blokey, boozy camaraderie that permeates his myth, especially when the Rat Pack or John Huston were involved.

The Bogart that Ferguson and co-writer Eleanor Emptage portray is defined by his relationships with women. The first two marriages might not leave much impression, but the third, to actress Mayo Methot, created the image of the “battling Bogarts”, as their increasingly violent relationship became public knowledge. The film repeats Louise Brooks’ claim that “No one contributed to Bogart’s success as much as Mayo Methot” – the implication being that she released him from the inhibitions imposed by his puritanical upper-middle-class upbringing. It’s an upbeat take, but I am haunted by the words of Richard Schickel (not quoted here) who saw them instead as “two alcoholics… locked in a punishing and dismal mutual dependency”. Years later, Methot died drunk and alone in a motel room while the remarried Bogart was on location for The African Queen. “Such a waste,” was his only comment.

Regarding the marriage to Lauren Bacall, Ferguson’s film adds little to what we already knew. She was 19 when Howard Hawks cast her opposite Bogie in To Have and Have Not, speculating, “Do you suppose we could make a girl who is insolent, as insolent as Bogart, who insults people, who grins when she does it, and people like it?” In retrospect he would realise it had been an ironic move: “Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so she had to keep playing it the rest of her life.” Whether playing a part or not, it seems irrefutable that Bacall gave him 13 years of genuine happiness. He made great films while married to her, with his turns in The Caine Mutiny and In a Lonely Place testaments to his range, subtlety and courage as an actor.

There are some good clips here demonstrating Bogart’s dramatic skill: but there could have been more, and they could have been longer. His gruelling years on the Warner Brothers conveyor belt (29 films in five years!) make for dispiriting viewing early on, but everything springs to life when he teams up with Huston and The Maltese Falcon takes shape. Soon after that came Casablanca which will remain, I imagine, the film that preserves him as an enduring icon. Everything that is best about the Bogart persona is there: the intelligence, the bone-dry humour, the wounded eyes, the sharp-edged cynicism which in fact offers no more than the thinnest of protective carapaces to wrap around the heart of a sincere but thwarted idealist.

Michael Wood brilliantly described Bogart in this film as an American hero who embodies “a dream of freedom… which converts selfishness from something of a vice into something of a virtue, and which confers a peculiar, gleaming prestige on loneliness”. Bogart’s gin-driven individualism has acquired a different meaning in a world in which people have become infinitely more atomised since Casablanca was made; and his brand of rueful machismo needs, now, to be viewed in the light of his always-ambiguous rapport with the women who partnered him on screen and off. But he remains a potent figure, and this mostly well-judged documentary does its job by offering a fistful of reasons to start watching his best films over and over again.

“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” is on digital platforms from 9 December. Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, “The Proof of My Innocence”, is published by Viking